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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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Nancy Pelosi’s Failure to Launch https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/23/opinion/trump-whistle-blower-impeachment.html

Three excellent editorials on the latest Trump criminal activity and the need to impeach. We have more than enough evidence to impeach this president!! It's time to muster the political will and courage to do so for the sake of our Democracy and future generations!!

"It is time for the Democrats to stop worrying about the tactics of election and decide just what it is we stand for. What are our principles? Are we for good government, or are we just about winning? Concentrating only on the upcoming presidential election will give this back-door president another fifteen months of opportunity. The question is not whether we have "the votes": the question is what do we believe? We keep saying, "If you see something, say something." It seems that now is the time to "Do something." The whole world is watching!"

"I see a parallel between Mitch McConnell's refusal to let any bill onto the Senate floor unless he has the president's assurance that he will sign it, and Nancy Pelosi's refusal to institute impeachment proceedings against Trump unless she is assured of the support of at least some Republicans and the general public. Both have given up their power as leaders of their party and become enablers of the most dangerous president in our country's history."

Nancy Pelosi’s Failure to Launch

The House speaker’s hesitation on impeachment empowers a lawless president.

By Michelle Goldberg | Published Sept. 23, 2019 | New York Times | Posted September 23, 2019 7:45 PM ET |

Elizabeth Warren on Friday evening sent out a series of tweets that, in addition to calling out Donald Trump for his criminality, rebuked Congress for enabling him. “After the Mueller report, Congress had a duty to begin impeachment,” wrote Warren. “By failing to act, Congress is complicit in Trump’s latest attempt to solicit foreign interference to aid him in U.S. elections. Do your constitutional duty and impeach the president.”

Warren was not impolitic enough to refer directly to the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, but the implicit criticism was clear. It was also well deserved. Pelosi’s calculated timidity on impeachment is emboldening Trump, demoralizing progressives, and failing the country.

The House speaker is a master legislator, and by all accounts incomparable at corralling votes. But right now, Democrats need a brawler willing to use every tool at her disposal to stop America’s descent into autocracy, and Pelosi has so far refused to rise to the occasion. As Representative Jared Huffman tweeted, “We are verging on tragic fecklessness.”

Part of Pelosi’s rationale for not impeaching after the release of the Mueller report was that such a move didn’t have majority support in the country or bipartisan support in Congress. Her allies worried that were Trump to be impeached in the House but not convicted in the Senate, he could emerge stronger than ever. Many Democrats in swing districts wanted to steer clear.

These were reasonable concerns, but inaction signaled to Trump that he would face no consequences for obstructing justice or for seeking a foreign power’s help in undermining a political opponent.

Now Trump has used the power of the presidency to do just that. We don’t yet know all the details in the whistle-blower report filed by a member of the intelligence community, which is now being kept, possibly illegally, from Congress. But there’s little question that the president tried to pressure the government of Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden; both Trump and his ranting disgrace of a lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, have admitted as much on television.

The idea was to try to force Ukraine to provide grist for a thoroughly debunked right-wing conspiracy theory that as vice president, Biden targeted a Ukrainian prosecutor on his son’s behalf. While Trump was strong-arming the reformist Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, his administration had frozen $250 million in security aid that the country desperately needed to defend itself against Russia, which invaded in 2014. It doesn’t matter if there was an explicit quid pro quo; Zelensky knew what Trump wanted from him. Trump deployed American foreign policy to extort a vulnerable nation to help his re-election campaign.

Trump’s latest defilement of his oath of office has pushed some previously reluctant Democrats, like the House Intelligence chairman Adam Schiff, toward impeachment. Schiff reportedly coordinated his recent pro-impeachment comments with Pelosi, yet she remains resistant to moving in the same direction. One of Pelosi’s advisers told the CNBC reporter John Harwood that her impeachment calculus hasn’t changed, saying, “See any G.O.P. votes for it?” It was almost as if the adviser was trying to troll scared, desperate Democrats, rubbing their faces in the speaker’s baffling determination to give Trump’s party veto power over accountability.

The most Pelosi has done is to write that if the whistle-blower’s complaint is kept from Congress, the administration “will be entering a grave new chapter of lawlessness which will take us into a whole new stage of investigation.” Given the impunity Trump has enjoyed so far, this does not seem like a threat with teeth.

Ultimately, no one can know the political consequences of impeachment in advance. I find it hard to imagine how months of televised hearings into a widely hated president’s comprehensive corruption could help him, but I can’t see the future. Perhaps impeachment in the House without removal in the Senate would allow Trump to convince some voters he’s been exonerated, though so does the failure to impeach him at all.

Polls show that impeachment doesn’t have majority support, so there’s a political risk for Democrats in trying to lead public opinion rather than follow it. But surely there’s also a risk in appearing weak and irresolute. Already, frustration with Pelosi in the Democratic base is threatening to curdle into despair. “I see the grass-roots activists who helped build the wave last year really wondering what they built that wave for,” Ezra Levin, co-founder of the progressive group Indivisible, told me.

In the end, our system offers no mechanism besides impeachment to check a president who operates like a mob boss. It’s true that Democrats will remove Trump only by beating him in 2020, but he is already cheating in that election, just as he did in 2016, and paying no price for it.

A formal impeachment process would, if nothing else, give new weight to Democratic claims when they go to court to enforce subpoenas or pry loose documents the administration is trying to hide. It would show that Democrats are serious when they say that Trump’s behavior is intolerable, and potentially allow them to seize control of the day-to-day narrative of this rancid presidency. Trump does not want to be impeached — a Monday Politico headline says, “Trump’s team is trying to stop impeachment before it starts.” It’s hard to imagine why any Democratic leader would assist them.

Donald Trump vs. the United States of America

Just the facts, in 40 sentences.

By David Leonhardt | Published Sept. 22, 2019 | New York Times | Posted September 23, 2019 7:45 PM ET |

Sometimes it’s worth stepping back to look at the full picture.

He has pressured a foreign leader to interfere in the 2020 American presidential election.

He urged a foreign country to intervene in the 2016 presidential election.

He divulged classified information to foreign officials.

He publicly undermined American intelligence agents while standing next to a hostile foreign autocrat.

He hired a national security adviser who he knew had secretly worked as a foreign lobbyist.

He encourages foreign leaders to enrich him and his family by staying at his hotels.

He genuflects to murderous dictators.

He has alienated America’s closest allies.

He lied to the American people about his company’s business dealings in Russia.

He tells new lies virtually every week — about the economy, voter fraud, even the weather.

He spends hours on end watching television and days on end staying at resorts.

He often declines to read briefing books or perform other basic functions of a president’s job.

He has aides, as well as members of his own party in Congress, who mock him behind his back as unfit for office.

He has repeatedly denigrated a deceased United States senator who was a war hero.

He insulted a Gold Star family — the survivors of American troops killed in action.

He described a former first lady, not long after she died, as “nasty.”

He described white supremacists as “some very fine people.”

He told four women of color, all citizens and members of Congress, to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came.”

He made a joke about Pocahontas during a ceremony honoring Native American World War II veterans.

He launched his political career by falsely claiming that the first black president was not really American.

He launched his presidential campaign by describing Mexicans as “rapists.”

He has described women, variously, as “a dog,” “a pig” and “horseface,” as well as “bleeding badly from a facelift” and having “blood coming out of her wherever.”

He has been accused of sexual assault or misconduct by multiple women.

He enthusiastically campaigned for a Senate candidate who was accused of molesting multiple teenage girls.

He waved around his arms, while giving a speech, to ridicule a physically disabled person.

He has encouraged his supporters to commit violence against his political opponents.

He has called for his opponents and critics to be investigated and jailed.

He uses a phrase popular with dictators — “the enemy of the people” — to describe journalists.

He attempts to undermine any independent source of information that he does not like, including judges, scientists, journalists, election officials, the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the Congressional Budget Office and the National Weather Service.

He has tried to harass the chairman of the Federal Reserve into lowering interest rates.

He said that a judge could not be objective because of his Mexican heritage.

He obstructed justice by trying to influence an investigation into his presidential campaign.

He violated federal law by directing his lawyer to pay $280,000 in hush money to cover up two apparent extramarital affairs.

He made his fortune partly through wide-scale financial fraud.

He has refused to release his tax returns.

He falsely accused his predecessor of wiretapping him.

He claimed that federal law-enforcement agents and prosecutors regularly fabricated evidence, thereby damaging the credibility of criminal investigations across the country.

He has ordered children to be physically separated from their parents.

He has suggested that America is no different from or better than Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

He has called America a “hellhole.”

He is the president of the United States, and he is a threat to virtually everything that the United States should stand for.

Trump and Election Interference, Whistle-Blower Edition

Many elements are murky, but something clearly stinks.

By Nicholas Kristof | Published Sept. 21, 2019 | New York Times | Posted September 23, 2019 7:45 PM ET |

There’s so much we don’t know about the whistle-blower complaint concerning President Trump. But here are four things we do know:

First, it seems that an experienced intelligence official was so deeply disturbed by Trump’s interactions with the president of Ukraine as to feel the need to blow the whistle.

Second, the inspector general for the intelligence community, Michael Atkinson, who was appointed by Trump and has long experience on national security issues, found the whistle-blower’s concern to be legitimate and urgent.

Third, the whistle-blower complaint came after Trump and his associates hounded Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to undertake a corruption investigation involving Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. The Ukrainian summary of a July 25 phone call between Trump and Zelensky included this cryptic sentence: “Donald Trump is convinced that the new Ukrainian government will be able to quickly improve image of Ukraine, complete investigation of corruption cases, which inhibited the interaction between Ukraine and the USA.” The Wall Street Journal reports that in that phone call, Trump pressed Zelensky about eight times to work with Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani to investigate the Bidens.

Eight times! Nevertheless, he persisted!

Fourth, Trump withheld $250 million in military assistance urgently needed by Ukraine to fend off Russian aggression, although Ukraine didn’t learn of this until August. He released the money after the whistle-blower complaint and after members of Congress intervened.

So for all the murkiness, let’s be clear: This stinks.

(Trump’s position is that his phone call with Zelensky was “pitch-perfect” and “It doesn’t matter what I discussed.”)

Thus it appears that after benefiting from Russian interference in the 2016 election, Trump then tried to coax Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 election. It’s particularly egregious that Trump seemed eager to trade $250 million in American taxpayer dollars for Ukrainian help in tarring a Democratic rival.

Giuliani has helpfully acknowledged that he urged Ukraine’s government to investigate whether Biden’s diplomatic efforts were meant to help Hunter, who had been involved in a gas company in Ukraine. (There’s no evidence of this.) Giuliani also pushed Ukraine to reinvestigate old corruption charges that ensnared Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and to conclude that this was a political attack on Trump.

In effect, Trump apparently tried to use American diplomatic might and the leverage of military assistance to get Ukraine to exonerate Manafort for 2016 and smear Biden for 2020.

The incoherence of the Trump-Giuliani position is underscored in this interview Thursday evening on CNN:

Chris Cuomo: Did you ask the Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden?

Rudy Giuliani: No. Actually, I didn’t …

Cuomo, 24 seconds later: So, you did ask Ukraine to look into Joe Biden?

Giuliani: Of course, I did.

Trump has been credibly accused of using the presidency to enrich himself (summits at Trump properties!), to protect himself from law enforcement (appeals to James Comey, offers of pardons!) and to punish perceived adversaries (Amazon, CNN, Andrew McCabe). Now he may have harnessed the power of the presidency to gain political advantage.

This is bombshell layered upon bombshell. On top of the initial accusation by the whistle-blower is the refusal of the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, to obey federal law and relay the matter to Congress within one week.

The law is very clear, but it’s also true that Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both suggested that there might be situations involving classified information where a president should not follow the statute. These are very tricky questions of executive power versus congressional oversight.

Jeffrey Smith, who was the C.I.A.’s general counsel under Clinton, told me that despite the technical legal arguments, there should still be ways to allow oversight, especially if the core issue is a commitment that the president has made to a foreign power.

Smith cited a time when he was at the C.I.A. and a matter came up that did not technically require reporting to Congress but still raised troubling questions. After some soul-searching within the agency, it provided a briefing to the “gang of eight” congressional leaders, and Smith told me that the same would be appropriate today.

Look, this whistle-blower’s complaint will leak. The Trump administration’s recalcitrance will simply make it all the more newsworthy.

When historians review Trump’s term, I think they will see combat between an out-of-control president and various U.S. institutions, such as the courts, the Civil Service, law enforcement, the intelligence community, the House and the news media, which generally have done a credible job of standing up for laws and norms and against one-man rule. The only institution Trump has co-opted completely is the Republican Party in Congress.

Today’s struggle over the whistle-blower may be remembered as a central battle in that epic confrontation. The core question is whether our president can get away with weaponizing the federal government to punish political opponents, or whether legal constraints and congressional oversight can keep him in line.

This is a test of our political system, and the next few months will determine whether we pass.

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soft-butch-cassidy · 7 years

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McCree is white and you have no canon proof that he isn't, and no your visual perseption and fantasy head canon doesn't count.

In order, here is McCree, Soldier:76 (who is white), and Sombra (who is Mexican). Tell me whose skin tone McCree’s is most similar to.

That’s right! Sombra’s!

McCree is from New Mexico. He has a cowboy theme. Cowboys were, historically, made mostly of non-white individuals, especially black men, Native Americans, and people of Mexican descent. Mexican cowboys were more common in the southwest, where McCree is from. That part of the United States was Mexico once, anyway. Plus, McCree wears a Mexican garment as a signature accessory: his serape.

Oh, but his name, one might cry! It’s Scottish!

Well, first of all, I’m sure there are people of Mexican heritage who have moved to Scotland and married into Scottish families and taken on Scottish names, and vice versa, especially considering that Overwatch takes place in the 2070s. Today, even, I mean, really, people have all kinds of surnames from all over the world Similarly, is it really that outlandish to consider McCree might be mixed race? Names are funny. I mentioned it earlier, but I have a friend from high school who is mixed. Her father is half German, have Puerto Rican, and her mother is black. She has a Japanese first name because she was born in Japan. She has a German last name. Names are weird.

Not only that, but we don’t know if McCree is McCree’s real name. “Pleasure working with you, McCree... if that is your real name.” “I don’t know what you heard, but my name’s not Joel. Best remember that.” That’s his pre-game interaction with Sombra. Which is, admittedly, vague, but we just don’t know for sure. It’s a reference to the early baby fandom, referring to Mysterious Unnamed (at the time) Cowboy Guy as Joel for some reason. Other theories include him secretly being the blogger that wrote about a vigilante (McCree) who saved a noodle shop. Still other theories are that he just gave himself the name Jesse McCree. It happens. Maybe he liked the name. Maybe he had a relative with the name and adopted it when he joined Deadlock or Blackwatch.

And, hey! If you don’t like Mexican American McCree, there’s always actual American McCree! As in, literally Native American! Mixed McCree is great too! There are so many possibilities! I, personally, prefer Native American/Mexican mixed McCree. He’s got a warmer skin tone and sharper cheekbones, which, from my (albeit limited) knowledge, tend to be common to Native American genetics.

Besides. If McCree isn’t white, does it affect you personally? If he’s Mexican or Native American or both, how does it change the game at all? Does it make you upset that this one character isn’t white? Think about why you’re so against a non-white McCree, and then apologize for being a racist shitstain.

#dont bring your racist headcanons to my ask box mate #anon #cas answers

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jobsearchtips02 · 4 years

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Wuhan coronavirus: Asian people seeing more racism amid outbreak fears

A man’s temperature being taken.

Stringer/Getty Images

As fears over the deadly coronavirus from China grow, so are racist and xenophobic incidents against Asian communities in the US, Canada, and Europe.

People of Asian descent have described to Business Insider and other outlets being discriminated at work, Costco, and a university campus.

In larger-scale incidents, customers from mainland China were banned from businesses in Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam, and more than 126,000 people in Singapore called for Chinese nationals to be banned from the country.

“We tend to exist in social silos where we’re surrounded by people who look like us, think like us, and act like us, and we are innately suspicious of folk that we don’t have contact with and we don’t understand,” Robert Fullilove, a professor of sociomedical sciences told Business Insider.

He also said it’s “almost impossible to contain stories” of misinformation and xenophobia when news moves so quickly in the media.

Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

The novel coronavirus from Wuhan, China, has killed more than 304 people in less than two months after its first case.

Authorities in China have quarantined more than ten cities, and the US, UK, and several other countries are quarantining all travelers who have recently visited China.

Yet some of the virus’ unexpected victims are those who have never even been anywhere near Wuhan.

Members of the Asian diaspora living in the US, Canada, Britain, and Italy have in recent days described, to Business Insider and other outlets, multiple incidents of being racially discriminated and isolated at school, work, and other public places.

Feature China/Barcroft Media via Getty Images

Here’s a roundup of apparently racist and xenophobic incidents, inflicted on Asian residents in foreign countries, in the past two weeks alone:

An eight-year-old boy — whose mother is Korean-American, and father is a mix of ethnic backgrounds including Filipino, Mexican, Chinese, Native American, and white — wearing a face mask was told by a Costco sample-stand worker to “get away because he may be ‘from China.'” Business Insider’s Sara Al-Arshani has the full story.

Students of east Asian descent at Arizona State University told Business Insider’s Bryan Pietsch their peers have started moving away from them and staring at them “a second longer” whenever they cough or sneeze.

Peter Akman, a reporter at Canada’s CTV broadcaster, tweeted an image of his Asian barber and said: “Hopefully ALL I got today was a haircut.” He has since deleted the post, apologized, and been fired.

The director of Rome’s prestigious Santa Cecilia music conservatory, Roberto Giuliani, suspended the lessons of all “oriental students (Chinese, Korean, Japanese etc.)” due to the epidemic, La Repubblica reported. Most of these students are second-generation Italian immigrants who have no relationship to the countries of origin, the newspaper said.

Le Courrier Picard, a daily regional newspaper in northern France, described the coronavirus as a “yellow alert” in a front-page headline last Sunday. It has since apologized, and French Asians have protested on social media under the hashtag #JeNeSuisPasUnVirus (“I am not a virus”).

Sam Phan, a British-Chinese Masters student at the University of Manchester, described in The Guardian overhearing people fearing going to London’s Chinatown, and seeing people physically move away from them in public areas.

A woman of Cambodian origin told Le Monde that her manager at a Paris bag store told her, “laughing: ‘I hope that your family hasn’t brought the virus back.'”

Frank Ye, a Chinese-Canadian student at the University of Toronto, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation his Asian Canadian friends had been told to move away or cover their mouths. “[It’s] this idea of ‘yellow peril,’ of this Chinese horde coming to destroy Western civilization,” he said.

Instagram users commented on a photo of a Chinese restaurant in Toronto, saying things like “No eating bats please!! That’s how coronavirus started in China!!” and “I ain’t tryna catch no virus.”

In more large-scale incidents, businesses in Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam have posted signs banning customers from mainland China; the hashtag #ChineseDon’tComeToJapan trended in Japan; and more than 126,000 people have signed a Singaporean petition calling for Chinese nationals to be banned from their country.

A woman walks on an empty road on January 27, 2020 in Wuhan, China.

Getty

Some of the conspiracy theories and misinformation circulating about the coronavirus also have tinges of racism and xenophobia.

A video appearing to show a young Chinese woman eating a raw bat with chopsticks has gone viral in recent weeks, with thousands of social media users — and some media outlets — claiming that the footage was taken in Wuhan, and suggesting that this is part of the normal Chinese diet.

(The video was actually taken in Palau, the Pacific Island country, in 2016 and was part of an online travel show about eating unusual local delicacies. Earlier this week she apologized for eating the food, saying she had “no idea during filming that there was such a virus.”)

The bat has since spurred multiple memes mocking what users think are Chinese eating habits, like “bats and bamboo and rats and s—,” and linking them to the disease.

Other misinformation surrounding the virus include theories that it can be cured with toxic bleach or oregano oil, or that it stems from a leak from China’s bioweapons program or 5G network.

—Rossalyn Warren (@RossalynWarren) January 30, 2020

—werner herzHog (@post_hog) January 23, 2020

The Wuhan coronavirus is spread from human to human, and has now spread to more than 20 countries. It is believed to have jumped from bats to snakes to humans.

The virus doesn’t seem to be as deadly as the SARS coronavirus — which, at current comparison levels, had a higher mortality rate — with experts telling Business Insider’s Holly Secon that global panic over the Wuhan virus is unproductive and unwarranted.

Blaming ‘the other’

Many people of Asian descent faced racist and xenophobic comments during the SARS epidemic too. SARS, like the Wuhan coronavirus, also originated from China.

Robert Fullilove, a professor of sociomedical sciences at the Columbia University Medical Center, told Business Insider the xenophobic fear surrounding coronarvirus is similar to the reaction toward HIV/AIDS in the 1980s, when there were no clear answers as to what caused the virus.

He said at the time, people blamed anyone but themselves — or “the other” — for AIDS, which was becoming rapidly deadly in communities of Haitians, intravenous drug users, and gay men.

This sort of reaction isn’t new, either. It dates as far back as Bubonic Plague in the 1300s, when there were false notions that Jewish people were poisoning peoples’ water to spread the infection, Fullilove said. The accusations led to the destruction of Jewish communities, and in parts of France and Switzerland, some Jews were banned from consuming food and drinks meant for Christians, while others were burned alive.

“We tend to exist in social silos where we’re surrounded by people who look like us, think like us, and act like us, and we are innately suspicious of folk that we don’t have contact with and we don’t understand,” he said of why xenophobic views spread in times of panic, adding that people use others as scapegoats.

Taxi drivers in protective suits are seen in front of a residential area, following an outbreak of the new coronavirus and the city’s lockdown, in Wuhan

Reuters

Fullilove said the best way to stop misinformation, especially when it comes to blaming a specific person or race, can be to make sure people have a clear idea of what’s happening with the virus.

Because of how quickly news spreads today on the internet, it becomes “almost impossible to contain stories” of misinformation and xenophobia, Fullilove said.

“Xenophobia works at its worst if people decide that the only thing they have to do is stay away from folk who are from China,” he said.

“There will come a point when it’s much more diverse in terms of who’s impacted, and if we’re unable to get people a clear message about what they have to do to protect themselves, not only will we not do the things that will help us stay reasonably safe, we’ll also create a lot of social damage that it will be very difficult to clean up.”

Women and children walk past personnel in protective clothing after arriving on US State Department-chartered aircraft to evacuate Americans back home from Wuhan.

Reuters

John C. Yang, president of the Asian Americans Advancing Justice civil-rights group, told NBC News that when people play off stereotypes to come to conclusions about the virus, they are “going for a simplistic and completely misinformed and frankly, ignorant answer.”

With the coronavirus, people have focused on stereotypes about Chinese people when coming to conclusions about the virus, he said.

“Unfortunately, there are definitely those people that still believe that somehow, Chinese culture generally, it’s backwards and foods are considered ‘exotic,'” Yang told NBC News. “That certainly leads to misperception and, even worse, misinformation or disinformation about what actually happens and what is the source of the coronavirus.”

The stigma appears to have become so prevalent that the medical officer of Toronto Public Health, Dr. Eileen de Villa, had to warn in a Wednesday statement: “Inaccurate information continues to spread and this is creating unnecessary stigma against members of our community … Discrimination is not acceptable.”

A Costco sample stand worker turned away a kid wearing a face mask because she thought he was ‘from China’ and could give her coronavirus

People are spreading memes and fake news online as the deadly coronavirus spreads across the globe

UC Berkeley is getting called out for saying anti-Chinese xenophobia is a ‘normal reaction’ to the coronavirus

China just completed work on the emergency hospital it set up to tackle the Wuhan coronavirus, and it took just 8 days to do it

Wuhan Virus China Xenophobia Racism

Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options.

from Job Search Tips https://jobsearchtips.net/wuhan-coronavirus-asian-people-seeing-more-racism-amid-outbreak-fears/

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djgblogger-blog · 6 years

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Forced sterilization programs in California once harmed thousands – particularly Latinas

http://bit.ly/2pydQfW

Postcard of the Napa State Hospital in Napa, Calif., circa 1905. Over 1,900 Californians were recommended for sterilization while patients here. The collection of Alex Wellerstein

Leer en español.

In 1942, 18-year-old Iris Lopez, a Mexican-American woman, started working at the Calship Yards in Los Angeles. Working on the home front building Victory Ships not only added to the war effort, but allowed Iris to support her family.

Iris’ participation in the World War II effort made her part of a celebrated time in U.S. history, when economic opportunities opened up for women and youth of color.

However, before joining the shipyards, Iris was entangled in another lesser-known history. At the age of 16, Iris was committed to a California institution and sterilized.

Iris wasn’t alone. In the first half of the 20th century, approximately 60,000 people were sterilized under U.S. eugenics programs. Eugenic laws in 32 states empowered government officials in public health, social work and state institutions to render people they deemed “unfit” infertile.

California led the nation in this effort at social engineering. Between the early 1920s and the 1950s, Iris and approximately 20,000 other people – one-third of the national total – were sterilized in California state institutions for the mentally ill and disabled.

To better understand the nation’s most aggressive eugenic sterilization program, our research team tracked sterilization requests of over 20,000 people. We wanted to know about the role patients’ race played in sterilization decisions. What made young women like Iris a target? How and why was she cast as “unfit”?

Racial biases affected Iris’ life and the lives of thousands of others. Their experiences serve as an important historical backdrop to ongoing issues in the U.S. today.

‘Race science’ and sterilization

Eugenics was seen as a “science” in the early 20th century, and its ideas remained popular into the midcentury. Advocating for the “science of better breeding,” eugenicists endorsed sterilizing people considered unfit to reproduce.

Under California’s eugenic law, first passed in 1909, anyone committed to a state institution could be sterilized. Many of those committed were sent by a court order. Others were committed by family members who wouldn’t or couldn’t care for them. Once a patient was admitted, medical superintendents held the legal power to recommend and authorize the operation.

Eugenics policies were shaped by entrenched hierarchies of race, class, gender and ability. Working-class youth, especially youth of color, were targeted for commitment and sterilization during the peak years.

Eugenic thinking was also used to support racist policies like anti-miscegenation laws and the Immigration Act of 1924. Anti-Mexican sentiment in particular was spurred by theories that Mexican immigrants and Mexican-Americans were at a “lower racial level.” Contemporary politicians and state officials often described Mexicans as inherently less intelligent, immoral, “hyperfertile” and criminally inclined.

These stereotypes appeared in reports written by state authorities. Mexicans and their descendants were described as “immigrants of an undesirable type.” If their existence in the U.S. was undesirable, then so was their reproduction.

Targeting Latinos and Latinas

In a study published March 22, we looked at the California program’s disproportionately high impact on the Latino population, primarily women and men from Mexico.

A sample sterilization form for a 15-year-old woman in California. Sterilization and Social Justice Lab, University of Michigan, CC BY-SA

Previous research examined racial bias in California’s sterilization program. But the extent of anti-Latino bias hadn’t been formally quantified. Latinas like Iris were certainly targeted for sterilization, but to what extent?

We used sterilization forms found by historian Alexandra Minna Stern to build a data set on over 20,000 people recommended for sterilization in California between 1919 and 1953. The racial categories used to classify Californians of Mexican origin were in flux during this time period, so we used Spanish surname criteria as a proxy. In 1950, 88 percent of Californians with a Spanish surname were of Mexican descent.

We compared patients recommended for sterilization to the patient population of each institution, which we reconstructed with data from census forms. We then measured sterilization rates between Latino and non-Latino patients, adjusting for age. (Both Latino patients and people recommended for sterilization tended to be younger.)

Latino men were 23 percent more likely to be sterilized than non-Latino men. The difference was even greater among women, with Latinas sterilized at 59 percent higher rates than non-Latinas.

In their records, doctors repeatedly cast young Latino men as biologically prone to crime, while young Latinas like Iris were described as “sex delinquents.” Their sterilizations were described as necessary to protect the state from increased crime, poverty and racial degeneracy.

Lasting impact

The legacy of these infringements on reproductive rights is still visible today.

Recent incidents in Tennessee, California and Oklahoma echo this past. In each case, people in contact with the criminal justice system – often people of color – were sterilized under coercive pressure from the state.

Contemporary justifications for this practice rely on core tenets of eugenics. Proponents argued that preventing the reproduction of some will help solve larger social issues like poverty. The doctor who sterilized incarcerated women in California without proper consent stated that doing so would save the state money in future welfare costs for “unwanted children.”

The eugenics era also echoes in the broader cultural and political landscape of the U.S. today. Latina women’s reproduction is repeatedly portrayed as a threat to the nation. Latina immigrants in particular are seen as hyperfertile. Their children are sometimes derogatorily referred to as “anchor babies” and described as a burden on the nation.

Reproductive justice

This history – and other histories of sterilization abuse of black, Native, Mexican immigrant and Puerto Rican women – inform the modern reproductive justice movement.

This movement, as defined by the advocacy group SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective is committed to “the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.”

As the fight for contemporary reproductive justice continues, it’s important to acknowledge the wrongs of the past. The nonprofit California Latinas for Reproductive Justice has co-sponsored a forthcoming bill that offers financial redress to living survivors of California’s eugenic sterilization program. “As reproductive justice advocates, we recognize the insidious impact state-sponsored policies have on the dignity and rights of poor women of color who are often stripped of their ability to form the families they want,” CLRJ Executive Director Laura Jiménez said in a statement.

This bill was introduced on Feb. 15 by Sen. Nancy Skinner, along with Assemblymember Monique Limón and Sen. Jim Beall.

If this bill passes, California would follow in the footsteps of North Carolina and Virginia, which began sterilization redress programs in 2013 and 2015.

In the words of Jimenez, “This bill is a step in the right direction in remedying the violence inflicted on these survivors.” In our view, financial compensation will never make up for the violation of survivors’ fundamental human rights. But it’s an opportunity to reaffirm the dignity and self-determination of all people.

Nicole L. Novak has received funding from the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health.

Natalie Lira has previously received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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